Larry Day

Lawrence James Day or Laurence J. Day (born Lorenzo del Giorno; October 29, 1921 – April 14, 1998), known professionally as Larry Day, was an American artist and visual arts instructor. He was active in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, New York City, and Washington, D.C. during the second half of the 20th century. Although Day initially established his career with lyrical, nature-based abstract paintings, he is primarily known for his representational works.

His paintings and works on paper were included in several exhibitions that refocused attention on figurative art in the 1960s. His work is held in national and international collections, including the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Woodmere Art Museum.

Early life Lorenzo del Giorno (aka Larry Day) was born on October 29, 1921, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to homemaker and seamstress Ethel Day (née Swain) and Laurence F. Day (né del Giorno), an Italian immigrant, woodworker, and employee of the American Laundry Machinery Company. Day had a younger sister named Ethel. At age six, his family moved to Cheltenham Township, a suburb of Philadelphia, where he lived until 1985. He attended Cheltenham High School, where he did well in music and poetry. He was a frequent visitor to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (now called Penn Museum), where he developed an interest in Egyptian art, particularly Fayum portraiture. He graduated second in a class of 260 in June 1940. After graduating, he began working as a bookkeeper.

From 1946 to 1950, Day attended Temple University’s Stella Elkins Tyler School of Fine Arts (now the Tyler School of Art and Architecture) on the G.I. Bill — critical support, as his parents could not afford his college education.

At Tyler, he studied fresco techniques, which he later credited as the foundation for his use of thinly painted surfaces. In 1948, Day saw the exhibition, Henry Matisse: Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, organized in collaboration with the Artist, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The directness of Matisse's work struck Day as radically different from the academic methods he was learning, thus influencing his understanding of painting. alongside Marcel Duchamp, Louise Nevelson, and Theodoros Stamos. He was an artist-in-residence at Aspen Center of Contemporary Art when it opened in 1960, and also in 1961, 1962, and 1964. In 1962, he overlapped with fellow artist-in-residence and lifelong friend Leland Bell from June 22 to September 1. a two-person show with Sidney Goodman at the Proctor Arts Institute at Bard College in 1965, and exhibitions at Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton, New York. Other group exhibitions during this period included 10/XII, Exhibition: Contemporary American Drawings at the Indiana University School of Fine Arts Gallery and Realism Now at the Vassar College Art Gallery, the latter curated by the art historian Linda Nochlin.

His work was also curated into exhibitions organized by the sculptor Scott Burton, including The Realist Revival, a traveling group exhibition presented by the American Federation of Arts in 1973. The show toured to several venues including the Georgia Museum of Art (Athens), the J.B. Speed Art Museum (KY), among other institutions. He co-juried Philadelphia in the Bicentennial Year: Drawings by Philadelphia Artists at the Atwood Gallery of Art, Beaver College (now Arcadia University) with Grace Hartigan, who selected the exhibition's award recipients.

In 1978, Day was awarded a fellowship to the MacDowell Colony the Annual Exhibition of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1984); and American Drawings: Realism/Idealism at the Boca Raton Museum of Art (1987). He represented Maryland in the two-year traveling National Invitational Drawing Exhibition, which featured one artist from each of the 50 U.S. states. He intermittently served as a senior critic at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Arts (1980–1989), taught summer classes and gave critiques at Queens College, and led critiques at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He was a visiting scholar at Western Carolina University in 1992 and a visiting critic at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1996. Although he retired from the University of the Arts in 1988, he continued to lecture there periodically through 1996. Eileen Neff, Joe Fyfe, thumb Larry Day, Yggdrasil, 1991, oil on linen, courtesy of copyright holder, Ruth E. Fine Awards and honors During the 1980s, Day received several honors and awards. These included the Temple University General Alumni Association Certificate of Honor for contributions to his profession (1980), the Hazlett Memorial Award for Excellence in the Arts from the Pennsylvania Governor's Office (1982), and a Citation for Excellence from the Pennsylvania House of Representatives (1982), a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation (1984), the Penny McCall Foundation Grant (1988), and the Mayor's Award for Contributions to the Cultural Life of the City of Philadelphia (1988).

Day's work was also about communities and interactions of people. He felt that the everyday was extraordinary, dramatic, and important. He frequently explored the dual role of the artist as both observer and participant, depicting the quiet labor of studio life with classical themes of grandeur, eroticism, and myth. Some of the self-portraits are self-deprecating or present him as ordinary. Many of the paintings featured his friends, and his presence is only implied. The Poker Game (1970) references Cézanne's poker game at the Barnes Foundation. He was represented in the drawings, but by the completion of the finished painting, he's represented by an empty chair.

Late narrative drawings Drawing was central to Day's artistic practice through his final years. In the 1990s he produced a series of linear ink works on paper representing literary, mythological and historical figures interacting in towns and villages. Legacy Day's journals and writings are now housed at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, while his visual art archives are best represented at Woodmere Art Museum. His work is held in national and international collections, including the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia.